


Cursing Wings

by Nehszriah



Series: The Thick of UNIT [14]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005), The Thick of It (TV)
Genre: AU of an AU, F/M, I still don't understand wing!fic, Prompt Fic, Wingfic, but an anon asked for this and I thought I'd give it a shot, fun fact: my hand is sore from bowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5580682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nehszriah/pseuds/Nehszriah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a tumblr prompt: Thick of UNIT AU where Malcolm isn't just the Terror of Whitehall, but also one of the "abnormalities" that UNIT tries to keep the peace with aka Human+ where the plus equals wings. Cue Malcolm's first day terrorizing molepeople with the added bonus of literally swooping in to chew someone out.</p>
<p>Can be read without having read any TTOU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cursing Wings

Back in Furness, he had been known as the owlman—the bastard son of some vagabond woman and her strigine-fae lover. First sprouting his… _extra limbs_ as a teen, it had been painful when they were growing in. He’d clipped them back for most of his life, keeping them more-or-less hidden beneath suit jackets and behind lies about benign growths. These things weren’t benign; they were anything but. He held himself back because of it, staying in the shadows. Something was comforting about being the man behind the man, the one just out of the spotlight, because it meant no one was looking at him. He liked not being looked at.

Instead Malcolm rolled up into a sitting position and swung his feet out of bed. He stretched his arms first, then his wings, uncrumpling them from a night of sleeping on them. They were going to be sore, or at least the left one was, because of how he had been laying the night before. He stood and rolled his shoulders, flapping the impossible attachments sprouting from his scapulae. Now that he hadn’t clipped back his wings in months, they’d grown in full for the first time in decades. The wingspan he sported was impressive if he did say so—a bit over three meters wasn’t bad—and his feathers had greyed along with his hair. They were interesting to look at from within the safety of his cell; it was technically called an on-site flat, but he knew better. There were no windows, just polished steel covering concrete, and the promise that he never had to leave the compound again unless he didn’t want to.

He was a prisoner of his own free will.

Slipping into his clothes for the day (tailor made to accommodate the need for holes), Malcolm prepared for what was bound to be another shitty time in the office. He exited his cell and walked through the corridors, taking solace in the fact that so many others wandering around were like him. Well, not exactly like him, with the wings and all, but many of the people who worked at UNIT had a reason for doing so. There were all sorts of people running about with extraterrestrial and non-human heritage, and now he was one of them. It took him over fifty fucking years to find it but now he was home.

“Rajit, what’cha got for me today?” he asked, entering his office. His PA, Aparajita, simply held out a piece of paper, which he took. “This is it?”

“Slow news week,” she replied dully. “Almost hoping a Rutan crash-lands or something.”

“If you ask, you shall receive,” he warned. “I’d rather it be slow every once in a while—less stress on us.”

“Have it your way,” she shrugged before going back to work.

He went into his office and found breakfast sitting on the table: a couple satsumas and a large, black coffee. This was really the life. He began peeling the fruit as he waded through the standard email memos and shite, chewing idly as he ate. It was comforting to know that anyone could walk in and not be the least bit surprised… so comforting he nearly couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Only an hour passed before an alarm went off: a cock-up was in-progress. He stood and glanced out the glass wall out onto the atrium filled with scrambling molemen as they tended to the panic. Was it brought on by their mistakes or someone else’s? He narrowed his eyes and scanned the crowd, hoping to tell exactly by what was going on.

It was their fuck-up, he quickly discerned. Kate was down on the main floor, shouting angrily at the techs that were scrambling about. She only really got like that when it was spectacularly bad on their end—Darwin Award-nomination-worthy. Whipping out his mobile, he stared at Kate as he rung her up. She picked up in a rage.

“ _What the **fuck** do you want, Tucker?!_” she snapped. She glared up at him, knowing exactly where he was. “ _I’m handling a situation down here_.”

“Which one did it, love?” he wondered. “Tell me which cunt did it so I can fuck with them.”

Kate grew silent, contemplating the offer. “ _Wait until the warning lights subside, then go ahead and give ‘em hell—the one on Monitor Seven_.”

“Read you loud and clear,” he replied. Malcolm ended the call and pocketed his mobile, observing the crowd below. It was an interesting show that the molemen ended up putting on; they were mostly highly-professional as far as minions went, but when they fucked up, it was royally. Eventually the chaos died down and all the shit that was going to hit the fan had finally been splattered. A scrambling of jets over Reykjavik, if what he gathered was correct, and it nearly went into some negative airspace that risked crashing into a civilian island-hopper. This was going to probably make the American news stations, though whether it was the cable tripe at 2 a.m. or the evening wank was up for debate.

The sirens and flashing lights subsided and Malcolm hit a button on his desk, the one right next to where he kept a photo of him and his niece, back when she was only a wee lass and both his hair and wings were both brown as tilled earth. The window-wall slid down, exposing his office to everything in the atrium. He spread his wings, jumped out, and flapped about for the best effect possible. Slamming down on the floor over by Monitor Seven, he landed in a crouch, which made him folding his wings and standing straight all the more intimidating.

“Alright; which one of you decided that they were going to be a fucking waste of space today?” he growled. A moleman cowered—bingo bango. He glowered at him, not impressed. “Glad you’re so willing to speak up.”

“I… uh…”

“Don’t you ever think about elbowing a button like that again!” he shouted. “I’ve got twelve different ways in which I can fucking eviscerate your arse without violating the rights those sods at Geneva say you’ve got, and about twenty more thanks to special UNIT overrides.”

“…b-but…”

“Do you want to fucking go?!”

“N-n-n-no…”

“Then get the fuck out of my monitoring systems and don’t come back until you can be a goddamned fucking person again!” The moleman scuttled away, likely having pissed his pants due to the smell of things, and the Head of Public Relations strutted through the monitoring stations, coming to a stop by his boss.

“You’re going soft now that you’re on payroll,” Kate snarked. Malcolm simply shoved his hands in his pockets and chuckled.

“Eh, got to save the true fury for the big shit,” he said. “I hope we never have to see that.” He stood behind her, taking one hand out of his pocket and wrapping his arm around her, resting his chin on her shoulder. His wings curled around them, protectively enveloping the two as the molemen carried on.

 


End file.
